X 



A PINCH OF SALT 



PROBABLY I have become unusually cautious 

 of late about accepting oflPhand all I read in 

 print on subjects of natural history. I take much of 

 it with a liberal pinch of salt. Newspaper reading 

 tends to make one cautious — and who does not 

 read newspapers in these days ? One of my critics 

 says, apropos of certain recent strictures of mine 

 upon some current nature writers, that I discredit 

 whatever I have not myself seen; that I belong to 

 that class of observers "whose view-point is nar- 

 rowed to the limit of their own personal experience." 

 This were a grievous fault if it were true, so much 

 we have to take upon trust in natural history as well 

 as in other history, and in Ufe in general. "Mr. 

 Burroughs might have remembered," says another 

 critic discussing the same subject, "that nobody 

 has seen quite so many things as everybody." How 

 true ! If I have ever been guilty of denying the truth 

 of what everybody has seen, my critic has just 

 ground for complaint. I was conscious, in the paper 

 referred to,^ of denying only the truth of certain 



1 Atlantic Monthly, March, 1903. 

 173 



